National Council and National Congress Divisions

The research for this book has entailed an analysis of many of the divisions by mandate at meetings of the National Congress and the National Council of the SFIO between June 1937 and September 1946. During that period the results of these divisions were recorded both as aggregate votes and as lists of the distribution of mandates by federation and were presented in the party's journal (La Vie du Parti until 1940 and the Bulletin Intérieur du Parti Socialiste (S.F.I.O.) after 1945) and for the 34th (1937) and 35th (1938) National Congresses in the published Comptes rendus sténographiques.

In order to obtain reliable and comparable division lists, the records of votes by federation were checked for any errors of transcription and addition which might have been made when the original data were prepared and printed. Two basic checking techniques were employed: first, the addition of the mandates attaching to each federal delegation, to make sure that the total matched the number of national mandates allocated to that federation, and, secondly, the addition of the mandates recorded under the different headings of a division in order to compare the results with the official returns published in the party journal.

The SFIO's 35th National Congress, held in the town of Royan between 4 and 7 June 1938, marked the conclusion of a brief period of bitter feuding between the Gauche Révolutionnaire and its opponents. At this meeting, the delegates decided to uphold the disciplinary action which had been taken against the Seine Federation in April and approved a policy resolution which confirmed the cautious strategy which the leadership had followed in the months preceding the congress, whereupon Marceau Pivert and his close supporters left the party to form an entirely new organization.

In this chapter we shall trace the stages by which this happened, dealing first with the period extending from mid-March to mid-April 1938, which saw the imposition of sanctions on the Seine Federation and the fall of Blum's second government; then with the attempt by Pivert and his group to challenge the dissolution of the Seine Federation, and with the various policy motions produced during the preparations for the Royan Congress; and finally, with the debates at this meeting, assessing the factors which enabled the leadership to gain the upper hand in its struggle with the tendances.

During the immediate post-war period the SFIO found itself under increasing stress as the combined task of restoring the national economy and constructing a constitutional settlement imposed heavy demands on successive governments. All of these rested on the alliance of three parties, the Communists, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats (the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, MRP), and as the Socialist Party possessed the greatest degree of internal democracy of the three, its rank-and-file members were the first to express their discontent at the disadvantages of being part of a governing coalition. By degrees their sense of grievance brought them to the verge of revolt and the task of this chapter is to describe this change of mood within the SFIO and to analyze the organizational crisis which it brought about at the party's 38th National Congress of August 1946.

The 37th National Congress of August 1945

Early in May 1945 as the war in Europe drew to its close, the French authorities were trying to locate and free those public figures who still remained in German hands. Prominent amongst these was Léon Blum and on 4 May Jules Moch, who was still serving in the navy, was given the task of searching for him.

By the end of 1937, the Popular Front was no more than a ghost of its former self, and each of its constituent parties was coming to accept that the balance of forces within the party system might alter drastically and suddenly, with only the briefest of warnings. This uncertainty weakened the internal cohesion of the SFIO and worked to the advantage of its dissident tendances, whose prescriptions for changes of strategy could now be recommended to the membership with much more urgency than in the past. In this chapter, we shall examine how both the Bataille Socialiste and the Gauche Révolutionnaire responded to this opportunity, and how the latter group greatly improved its organizational and moral position within the party. Its first gains were made at the National Council meeting of 17 January 1938, where the central leaders maintained their authority only by agreeing that the party should not be represented in the government which Camille Chautemps was then trying to form. Shortly afterwards, the Gauche Révolutionnaire took charge of the Seine Federation, one of the most powerful administrative units within the party's organization, and immediately launched a drive to force a change of strategy upon the next regular meeting of the National Council, which was expected to take place on 27 March.

Within a few months of its 38th National Congress, the SFIO was embroiled in the complicated politics which accompanied the establishment of the Fourth Republic. The constitutional framework developed by the second Constituent Assembly was approved by 53 per cent of the votes in the referendum of 13 October 1946 and arrangements were then set in hand for elections to the two houses of parliament, the National Assembly and the Council of the Republic, the members of which would elect the first President of the Republic for a seven-year term. The President's first task would be to choose a Premier who, once in office, would be expected to obtain the approval of the National Assembly for the government which he intended to form. At last the period of provisional government was coming to an end and there was intense competition between the parties for a secure place within the permanent system.

The Socialists had hopes that they would emerge from the National Assembly elections of 10 November as the largest party in the new house and thus be in a position to form a purely Socialist government based on a broad parliamentary alliance with other parties so the results of the poll were a great disappointment to them.

This book deals with an unusually turbulent chapter in the history of the French Socialist Party, the period from the beginning of 1938 until the summer and autumn of 1946. During the late 1930s, the party was still tolerating the activities of two dissident groups within its ranks, the Gauche Révolutionnaire and the Bataille Socialiste, both of which wished to see the organization take a new direction. The intense competition between them as each tried to gather support for its own views on strategy produced a series of major crises within the party during the first six months of 1938 and threatened to undermine the leadership group, which had some difficulty in maintaining its position at the party's Royan Congress in June that year. No sooner had order been restored than the party found itself divided again, this time over foreign policy and the question of whether it should favour conciliation as a means of avoiding war or should come out in support of a firm policy towards Germany and Italy. The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to normal political activity in France but throughout the period of German occupation and the Vichy regime, a new generation of Socialists played a prominent part in the Resistance movement and looked forward to the re-emergence of the party, freed from disagreements and structural weaknesses, when hostilities ended.

We have now completed our review of the crises which affected the Socialist Party in 1938 and 1946. All that remains is to compare their general features and to draw some conclusions from the comparison.

As we have seen, the crisis of 1938 occurred because of the reluctance of the SFIO's leaders to abandon the Popular Front or, more precisely, to end the alliance with the Radicals and have the party return to the role of qualified opposition which it had assumed before 1936. They took this position first because they wished to protect the reform legislation of 1936, which they feared might be repealed or watered down by a conservative government; secondly, because some of them, especially Léon Blum, were concerned about the deterioration of the international situation and the need to ensure an adequate measure of continuity and stability in French domestic politics; and finally, because they still hoped that the Popular Front could be given a new lease of life and a further programme of reforms carried through parliament. Their difficulty lay in justifying this policy to the party's ordinary members, who were still wedded to the view that, ideally, the party should avoid participation in the government of a bourgeois state and that, rather than compromise its principles by attempting to sustain an alliance which no longer served its purpose, it should retreat once more to the well-known ground of opposition.

One of the posters produced in the early 1920s by the Moscow Provincial Soviet of Trade Unions shows a grim industrial town, and a crowd of downtrodden women shuffling from left to right, shawls round their shoulders, kerchiefs over their heads; in the foreground a group of plump men of the bourgeoisie stand and leer. Its central characters are a young man and a young woman: he, disproportionately large, holds in his left hand a hammer, sign of his membership of the proletariat; she, small-scale and dejected, is clearly in need of assistance – and indeed, the worker is holding out his free arm to her in a gesture of fraternal solicitude. The text reinforces this visual image of the prostitute as victim: ‘By destroying capitalism the proletariat destroys prostitution. Prostitution is a great misfortune for humanity. Worker take care of the woman worker.’ The date of publication was 1923, two years after the introduction of the New Economic Policy; the country was still recovering from the economic and social chaos of revolution, civil war and famine, and for the working class faced with a housing crisis, low wages and high unemployment, life was hard. It was particularly hard for women, many of whom had to support themselves and their families in conditions of a shrinking job market. The alarming level of redundancies among the female labour force appeared, albeit as a minor item, on party and trade union agendas.

Over the past two decades, the study of women in Russian and Soviet society has become one of the liveliest areas of Western research into Russian literature, history and the social sciences. The spark that ignited this new enthusiasm was, for many, the women's movement in the West, which burst into life in the late 1960s after a long quiescence of almost fifty years. For some of those who became involved in Russian women's studies, this new wave of feminism affirmed what they already knew; for others it had the force of a revelation; for still others it produced confusion or ambivalence and only slowly prompted them to view the world – and academia – from a new perspective. But however the new ideas were received, there is no doubt that they were responsible for generating a widespread curiosity that had never previously existed in the West about the history of Russia's female population, about Russian women writers and artists and about the current social and economic situation of women in the Soviet Union.

During this twenty-year period, however, most of the Western scholars who pursued these new concerns were living with a paradox. Many were initially attracted to the study of Russian and Soviet women because it seemed (from a Western perspective) that a degree of equality and recognition had been won by women in the Soviet Union that had not been achieved in the West.

This chapter extends an earlier study of mine, on misogyny in the Russian popular puppet show Petrushka (the equivalent of Punch and Judy). In that earlier study I argued that in the Petrushka show a female character was very often held up to ridicule whilst the male hero was not, that sexuality was an important element in this ridicule, and that this situation raised important problems of audience reaction which had not been properly dealt with by the three standard interpretations of Petrushka (vulgar Marxist class-based analysis, reading of the text as primal fertility ritual and the Bakhtinian theory of carnival). The aim now is to move out from the study of the character and ramifications of one discrete popular urban tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and make some observations about the representation of women in a range of genres used for urban entertainment at that period. As before, I shall be putting considerable emphasis on the context of performance, and shall be analysing the question of the audience's reception. But I hope to take the final part of the discussion rather further, expanding a little on the possible implications of patterns in popular entertainment for wider issues of urban history at the turn of the century.

Like all of Russia's female revolutionaries, Ekaterina Dmitrievna Kuskova (1869–1958) forged her political career in a male-dominated oppositional movement that relegated women to a secondary, supporting role. Her forceful personality, however, along with an ability to articulate the demands of the moderate socialist and left liberal intelligentsia enabled her to overcome this marginalization and assume a place at the very centre of Russian revolutionary politics. By 1917, Kuskova had achieved considerable prominence as a non-party social democrat, well known even beyond intelligentsia circles for her work as a journalist and an activist in the cooperative movement. By this time, too, she had entered the ranks of Russian feminists as an outspoken advocate of women's rights. But it was socialism rather than feminism that informed Kuskova's politics in the period between the February and October revolutions, and she subordinated all other interests to the establishment of democracy in Russia. Moreover, throughout 1917 she continued, as she had in the past, to ignore her identity as a woman, remaining unconcerned with, if not actually unaware of, the extent to which her gender shaped her politics.

Any account of Kuskova's politics during this crucial year must remain incomplete until additional archival sources become accessible. Nevertheless, available sources are adequate to construct a fairly detailed, if still preliminary, description of her efforts to lay the foundations of democracy in the period between February and October.

By the turn of the century and throughout the Silver Age, Russian women writers had moved into the ranks of the profession, becoming increasingly visible and recognized by their peers as well as their audience. Some women writers were very successful and earned considerable rewards, others not. But by and large, this movement pointed towards a progressive acceptance of women writers as meaningful participants in the creative process of Russian literature and their eventual full integration into the dominant canon. The events of the First World War, the Revolution and the Civil War brought about significant changes in this promising development. The revolution and the civil war split Russia in two, literally and figuratively: one lost the very name of Russia and became first the RSFSR and then the USSR; the other, defeated by Lenin's government, rejecting and escaping the newly created RSFSR, constituted itself into a Russia beyond the borders, Russia Abroad.’ An approximate periodization should provide some orientation in the further development of Russian women writing in the post-1917 period.

As is well known, in the early period of the division ‘both Russias’ continued to promote modernism in its various forms at least until well into the twenties.